Proximity discovery is a technology for performing communication by using a characteristic that physical locations of at least two terminals are proximate. The proximity discovery is applied to many application scenarios. For example, the proximity discovery is used for discovering a nearby friend or a person having a same interest in a social network application, viewing what discount information is available nearby in an advertisement application, and searching for a nearby restaurant in a location-based service.
A discovery resource is a communications resource used for implementing proximity discovery. In an existing proximity discovery technology, a base station is generally used to broadcast information carrying a discovery resource, and then a user equipment acquires the discovery resource by listening to the information that is broadcast by the base station. However, when a collision between discovery resources of a cell changes, discovery performance may be affected, and therefore an entire utilization rate of the discovery resources is relatively low, where the discovery performance includes a discovery probability, a discovery delay, a discovery quantity within a unit distance and the like of a user equipment.